Short-Seller Buys into Mets

    This doesn’t make sense.   They're two games out of last place now.   But it’s only a minority interest.  Maybe he’s looking to pick up everybody else's shares after gaming the season record way down once they hit rock bottom in the standings.

Herman's Gym

    Your blogger recently finished rehabbing a shoulder impingement (subacromial bursitis), and signed up for weight training at Herman‘s Gym, a sporting life style aptly suited for today's tony 70 year-old man.

    You 1) get out of the house, which is probably most of it, and 2) go and hang out somewhere that isn’t the Senior Center.  To top it all off, we push or pull on these weighty space age contraptions, a few times at a time, moving poundages selected by the guy running the place, clearly, in my case, chosen for insurance purposes relating to letting tony 70 year-old men push or pull on weighty space age contraptions; and then everybody gets to sit around doing absolutely nothing for as long as we want until someone decides to push or pull on one of Herman's contraptions again.  If you bring friends, you can talk, otherwise you make new ones and talk anyway.  I think everybody’s there for the same reason (see 1 above), giving married body builders plenty they kind of have to talk about.  Gym guy hands you a sheet showing which contraptions and how many pushes or pulls, so gym rats can manage the in-between times needed to kill an entire afternoon.  Day, if the missus gives you that kind of motivation, apparently.

    Herman lined the walls with full length mirrors, so the best part, for guys anyway, seems to be sitting there and staring at your great big muscles, which I, of course, don't get to do yet as I just started and don't have any.

    Whatever, the treadmills along Herman's longest mirrored wall have these skinny little TV sets on the handlebars so the body builder can watch market news while he walks really fast, or jogs, like some showoffs I know, and just after I coughed up the reasonable Herman’s Thrifty Annual Gym (Free Month) Fee and started really getting into it (see 2 above), something came on the treadmills that was startling news at the gym, and gym guy ran up and everybody dismounted their contraptions and hustled over right after him, and, to make a long story short, they’re about to nail Arnold Schwarzenegger on a multiple love child rap.

    I haven’t been back there since.

    Apparently, there really is something to having too much time on your hands, and your blogger doesn't like what Herman is training him to do with it, as reported to everyone in the whole gym last week on his own dang treadmills.

Risk on, Risk off

    Pay attention the next time this comes up on TV, and see if you think we’re right.

    “Risk on” means some Don recently put the word out that companies tied to the business cycle should be bought, and the Crime Families bought them.  Together.  “Risk off” refers to the same process, except this time racketeers started shorting as one.

    When delivered with a sneer, either tells cronies the financial comedian is in on the next phone call, and we’re not.

    Whichever way, try jumping aboard with them at this flim-flam man's news, and the thieving lowlifes will whipsaw you, and that's part of their little joke too.

Sell Intel?

    Whenever an analytical thug from the Crime Families publicizes his call, you assume that somebody’s got a position on the wrong side of the market, and one Don or another is getting unruly.  Nobody wants an unruly Don around the office, believe me.  Body parts get crushed.  Analytical thugs spin these self-serving fabrications designed to bully market participants into doing whatever it takes to turn impending Family catastrophe into some more Family booty.

    Whenever an analytical thug from the Crime Families wants to say something that might actually help somebody, it's always very hush-hush.

    So after Goldberg, Styx slimed Intel yesterday, and, in the blink of an eye, the market price got chopped by half a point, we decided to scope it out and pass along whatever we came up with.  INTC just reported a blowout first quarter, unrolled some new fangled, gee-whiz game-changers across product lines that short-sellers have been ragging them about of late, and reaffirmed a scorching 2011 outlook.

    In a remarkably perpetual growth arena where, by caveat, chip functionality doubles every two years, this Juggernaut has built the quintessential corporate fortress.  Its valuation has been compressing for years now, creating a rather remarkable income play with growth kicker.  Yielding better than 3.5% on the just-increased dividend and discounting projected double digit, but cyclical, growth at a price/earnings multiple of 11, the stock has to be considered one of the great blue chip bargains of the day, or at least a compelling candidate.

    Basically, anybody getting a handle on these kind of fundamentals has been rewarded way beyond reason over the long term.  Paramount in this case seems to be the understanding that 1) any outfit this good has to toss away a bone or two from time to time just to keep the anti-trust rottweilers at bay, and 2) the industry landscape is totally upheaved periodically, and while drama certainly ensues, the ultimate prize always goes to Dominatrix Intel.  The gal's got muscle.

   For income investors, this kind of opportunity doesn't come along ever.  Not in the world-class growth sector anyway.  Looking at the charts, you think you see the dotcom bubble reaching out still, haunting INTC somehow from way back before the turn of the century.  Whatever is going on, it's odd.  Really odd.

    Odd is the short-seller's calling card.  You just know they're in this somewhere.

    I dug through comments on a couple of websites.  They all said the same thing.  Investors think Intel is the blue chip bargain of the day, or at least a compelling candidate, and Goldberg’s thug publicized his call because somebody over there has a huge short position and the market hasn’t been cooperating.

    Most players don‘t understand about the Dons, and those who do aren’t talking, so nobody mentioned the part where one Don or another gets unruly, but one or another most certainly is.

    Nobody wants an unruly Don around the office, believe me.  Body parts get crushed.

    On the other hand, it’s universally understood that Goldberg, Styx bet against its own clients on at least (chuckle) one occasion during the financial holocaust, having dumped worthless products on them to begin with.  And then there was the way that racketeers got the bean counters to make mark-to-market mandatory, letting the Street crush banks and SBICs and them by inflicting phony-baloney market quotes on everybody‘s reported financials.  This Intel spin could be the Crime Family’s way of telling INTC investors you’re about to go down for reasons that you couldn‘t possibly know about because we‘re messing with you suckers big time again.

    Wall Street is always up to no good.  These are racketeers who game oil prices by storing crude in anchored tankers for no reason other than to game oil prices by storing crude in anchored tankers.  While wizened investors see Intel as confoundingly undervalued, they cannot overlook the new reality that today’s Dons are fully capable of razing Fortress Intel, or anybody else for that matter, to the ground, and there‘s no law enforcement in place that can stop that from happening.

    Amidst this unabated financial reign of terror, the Securities & Excuses Commission has become some kind of sick mob joke.

Donald Ducks Out

    In an announcement greeted with spontaneous ennui by a reality-weary nation, lavishly tax-sheltered New York landlord, Donald Trump, today informed actual tax-paying citizens that he will not be showing his U.S. Federal Income Tax Returns to anybody anytime soon, if ever, Baby.  By declining to throw his hat into the Presidential campaign ring, the curiously coiffed accelerated depreciation icon, who should probably be wearing the damn hat anyway, brought the number of Republican candidates for Charlatan-in-Chief from zero back up to zero once again.  Or down to zero, I suppose, if you're a liberal Democrat.

    Whatever, The MacDougal Post is saddened to announce we are withdrawing our support for all candidates for any public office in 2012, unless Lindsay Lohan runs for the California Judiciary, or something.

    If our loyal readers really need an explanation, "why bother?" is one that comes immediately to mind.

A Total Nobody Goes to Jail

    Raj Bottabingbottaboom is guilty on all counts, and once again SEC goons manage to draw attention away from mainstream organized financial racketeering by the Wall Street Crime Families as well as the real swindles themselves.  Complicit media operatives, pointing to what they say is a cast of thousands, seal the deal with how working stiffs like you and me were responsible for it all.

    Un/underemployment continues raging at something over at least 40%, the nation is no closer to coming up for air than it was at the bottom of the financial holocaust, if you have any inkling at all as to where the Charlatan of the Fed is taking us, that is, and still nobody swindling us into this mess has been arrested.  NOBODY.  NO-CULPABLE-BODY.

    And the schools keep teaching our children that plutocracy works.  Without even calling what we've got here by its correct name.

    "Unbelievable" doesn't begin to cover this calamari anymore.

The Efficient Rigged Market Theory

    The Efficient Market Theory out of the University of Chicago, discredited over the years because market participants can’t understand anything they’re talking about over at the University of Chicago, really does work - if you account for the fact that somebody’s gaming markets in the first place.  This should come as no surprise to loyal MacDougal Post readers, who’ve met many of those same somebodies right here in these hard-boiled pages.

    Zigmund Floyd, Director of Indictable Market Behavior at Wall Street investment banking behemoth, Filch & Finagle, made that point as well as anyone over a steaming cup of McDonald’s cappuccino, at least I think it was cappuccino, way too early the other morning.  “We grab everybody’s dough all the time", Zigmund extolled.  You want efficiency, look at my year end bonus, for starters.”

    It was 3 AM and McDonald’s was in the throes of its recent initiative to add 50 thousand jobs and increase store hours, and the place was empty and the parolees, I mean new-hires, were off shooting craps behind the dumpster or something.  Like who did McDonald’s expect to sign on for 3 o’clock in the post-evening pre-morning anyway?  Laid-off yuppies?

    Face it, what kind of laid-off yuppie …. Never mind; this has nothing to do with efficient rigged market theory.  But geeze, only a usual suspect would even consider prowling around at that God-forsaken hour.

    And your diligent blogger, dedicated to ratting him out.

    The cappuccino, or whatever, got poured when we finally tracked down one of the convicted felons and about dragged him back to his work station.  It was zesty enough, with traces of verve and mellowed ebullience, piping hot to the lip without that hint of imminent cauterization you‘d expect to find in some other fast food cappuccino if anybody else were nutty enough to open their sparkling glass doors to the forlorn post-evening pre-morning nothingness.

    “So you’re saying”, I tried to probe, “that all appropriate information is already in the market prices, and ….”

    “F#%$ no. I’m saying the Don yells, “Sell, Sell, Sell” and calls in to the other Dons, “Sell, Sell, Sell”, and the other Dons yell “Sell, Sell, Sell” to their guys, and then we’re all yelling, “Sell, Sell, Sell”, and we issue ourselves phony-baloney shares and sell, and the Dons sell their phony-baloney shares too, and the Family sells more phony, and all the Families sell much, much more phony, and the Dow gets whacked for 8 thousand points or whatever, and the rest of you are f#%&!%, and your real shares are f#%&!% as well, and we collect big fat year end bonuses.”

    “Oh.”

    “Totally f#%$!%, McDougal."

    “I know, Zigmund.”

    “Totally, totally f#%$!%.”

    “Oh, shut up.”

    “You don’t know how f#%$!% you people are.”

    Nobody was left at McDonald’s when I took it on the lam through the smudgy glass doorway and slipped into the utter solitude of another post-evening pre-morning vacuum- except for one complete jerk, and I’m never talking to that creep again.

    This put-America-back-to-work-flipping-burgers thing isn’t going all that well either, if you ask me.  What we need to do is hire skilled hard hats and start tearing down some flipping single family housing units, if we‘re ever to read any decent economic statistics in our flipping lifetimes again.

Sell-off in the Commodity Rackets

    Crime Families, acting as one, issued themselves phony paper by the truckload yesterday to sell commodity markets short en masse, sending prices there tumbling.  To pull off a swindle like this, one single Don generally puts the word out, and the whole mob jumps in, clogging channels with massive numbers of sell orders.  Counterparties aren’t told that they’re buying thin air, bogus nothingness to be removed from the marketplace when prices get trashed low enough, and Government turns its regulatory head away as if gangbanging victims to filch their cash isn’t grand larceny on a brobdingnagian scale.

    In its coverage this morning, The New York Times labels these Gangland thugs “investors”.  Why co-conspirators embedded at this rag haven’t been nabbed for aiding and abetting with these endless cover-ups, only God Himself could tell you.

Quote of the Day

    "Heaven is a divine state of enlightenment where numbers govern, and only CPA’s are allowed to hold public office or sit on juries."

    - MacDougal Irving, minor Early 21st Century American financial reform blogger having no discernable impact on Early 21st Century American financial reform whatsoever.  In fact there didn't even appear to be any financial reform in Early 21st Century America, except for Fabulous Fab, this French guy at Goldberg Styx and maybe that Raj Bottabingbottaboom person who wasn't from America to begin with either, but his various juries took so long to come up with a verdict Early 21st Century Americans lost interest in financial reform, and nobody else even came close to getting locked up with Bernie in Club Fed, and Early 21st Century America stopped paying interest on its US Treasury Bonds, Notes, and Bills that August and flushed itself right down the crapper.

Election Bulletin

    Now that the War against Muslim Teenagers with Bombs has produced one win everyone can agree upon, The Great Hawaiian, Obama, offing the Evil Archfiend, Osama, with model airplanes, at least that’s what Geraldo said, a grateful Nation thanks our Commander-in-Chief for waiting a week to tell us so he could pre-empt The Donald’s entertainment-challenged reality show and take that total waste of National resources out too, for a while anyway.

    In view of his inspired defense of our country's airwaves, The MacDougal Post is pleased to announce that we are endorsing the Honolulu, as well as the New York, candidate at this time.

    This is really getting good.